| |
30
Chapter 3. Pilot Studies: Lessons Learned from Early Projects
a proper way. The goal is to bridge the gap between the instructions and the real
world. In particular, we have developed a system using LED’s attached to furniture
as a way of guiding users through a furniture assembly process. In Section 3.1.4 we
evaluate the approach of integrating instructions into the actual objects. We report
on a user study discussing the e ectiveness of dynamic instructions in comparison
to traditional paper instructions. Section 3.1.4 summarizes the results we gained
within the course of this project, and Section 3.2 discusses the lessons learned from
this project.
This project, in particular the user studies at the end, was conducted in close coop-
eration with Stavros Antifakos.
3.1.1 Motivation: Why Furniture Assembly
After several break-out sessions in the development team, a flat-pack furniture as-
sembly scenario was chosen (DIY furniture: Do It Yourself furniture). The idea was
to instrument furniture parts with sensors and as such to monitor the user’s actions
and the state of the assembly. This monitoring should be used to give situation-
aware hints to the user. The assembly process deals with real physical objects and
is based on a closed world assumption: Only certain actions of the user with the
appropriate parts finish the task.
This system should showcase how sensing could be useful within various kinds of
assembly tasks compared to printed handbooks, instructions, and reference manuals,
because they all have one thing in common: They are rarely used. And when people
have to use them, they usually do not like them. The reasons for this unpopularity
of instructions are, naturally, manifold. People might be lazy, self-confident and
might have no time to spend bothering with instructions. Also the quality of the
instructions is quite often not satisfactory. Maybe even more importantly, di erent
people have di erent levels of expertise and therefore require a di erent set or type
of instructions. Another reason why instructions can be rather frustrating is the
following: when users get stuck and want to look into the instructions they expect
to find the necessary information immediately. Instructions therefore should be
usable as a reference manual, but also as instructions for the expert, as well as the
beginner with close to no prior knowledge. Another important limitation of today’s
instructions is that they are mostly linear, since they only describe one way (or at
most a limited number of ways) to complete the task. For a beginner, this might be
appropriate. But for everybody else, this can be too restrictive and quite annoying.
An ideal design of objects should not require any instructions at all: users should be
able to guess and understand the functionality at a glance. However, it is hard to
eliminate instructions in general. It would already be an achievement to integrate
|  |
|
| |
|
|
